Product & Advertising Suggestions

For what it's worth, I would like you offer you a few suggestions, based on my own use and interaction...

Change your policy of keeping key construction details secret

I consider the difference between 2-bit MLC and 3-bit/4-bit TLC NAND to be as significant as the difference between a car with and without power steering. I need to know this information because it will play a decisive factor in regards to how much money I am willing to invest. Further, all IT managers and a huge proportion of home-use consumers are aware of the inferiorirty of TLC NAND (versus MLC NAND.) Specifically, the lower write speeds, shorter life spans, and more issues with error correction and lower endurance often makes premium MLC less expensive than TLC in the long run. If reliability and longevity are the most important factors, MLC-based SSDs, flash drives, and SD cards are often very superior. I know many of your flagship products are made using MLC, and your MLC has an outstanding reputation, but if you do not confirm this you are losing business to Samsung, Mushkin, Micron, Transcend, Corsair, and Patriot, all whom disclose which flash drives and SD cards use superior MLC NAND. The best justification for purchasing a higher end flash drive is for the MLC NAND and its benefits -- with your current policy, you cannot benefit from this type of upselling, and customers only interested in MLC flash drives are forced to go for another brand.

The advertising practice of, "transfer speeds up to..." does more harm than good

The industry practice of "transfer speeds up to ### MB/s!" has a limited practical value, but worse, it could also confuse consumers that do not understand flash memory. This makes it sound as if read and write speeds are similar, where as we could be talking a 10-fold difference. That's setting good products up to disapoint. In some cases, this type of advertising can cause consumers to return working products with the belief that they are defective because the massive gap between transfer speed vs. real-world write speeds. Listing read and write speeds seperately is arguably more useful than a single, combined, statistic.

Offer a MLC or eMLC flash drive targeted for the enterprise market

Your Cruzer Titanium models saw widespread adoption because they were reliable and they were durable. Both the SLC and MLC Cruzer Titanium variants are still used today by many, a testament to their longevity. They are arguably one of the best-designed tech products in a very long time. It would be nice to have something like it.

Let's see some more metals

During the era of the Cruzer Titanium, you had several different products that used metallic casings. I really like my flash drives to be designed so that, if accidentally stepped on, they would not be destroyed and the flash drive's body will have enough strength and rigidity to resist cracking or bending in, damaging the NAND. Obviously, this would push the price up higher, but products like the Corsair GTX and several LaCie flash drives show that there is a market for this sort of product. Zinc, magnesium aluminum, titanium, and DLCs are all very easy to love.